Eleanor stared at him, then again down at the letter. “I am not sure I know how, exactly,” she admitted. “I haven’t talked about this in…” She looked at Richard. “A lifetime.”
I edged toward her. “You told me some of it,” I said. “You left out a lot, obviously, but maybe start there?”
“Please,” Nick pleaded. “This didn’t just happen to you. It happened to them, and now it’s happening to all of us, and I just…we…want to understand. Help us understand, Gran.”
Eleanor peered up at us, her four confessors, positioned around her now almost in a semicircle. She seemed diminished somehow, frail, and almost fearful. Finally, she gestured for us to take a seat.
“You came here for answers,” she said. “And there aren’t any short ones.”
I sat obligingly down in the armchair opposite her, Freddie taking the one next to me. Richard leaned slightly on the bed, as if in need of support but unwilling to sit and cede his height advantage. Nick kept pacing.
“Eleanor,” I said. “How much of what you told me was real?”
“That depends on your perspective,” she said. Nick made a noise of disbelief and Eleanor straightened a little. “Georgina had everyone wrapped around her finger, and she milked it. Daddy adored her. The press delighted in her. Our family friends flocked past me straight to her. Even Grandmummy thought she could do no wrong, while I was nothing but a disappointment. She got to go away for school, make friends, see a bit of the world, and have the sorts of life experiences that are thrilling for a young girl, but which were deemed too common for me. I had to stay home, locked away, preparing for my life of duty. All I gave was effort, day in and day out, and it was never enough. But Henry looked out for me, first as my tutor then as my friend. And when I lost…” She stopped and covered her mouth.
“Her first love,” I filled in for her to the others. “Her parents sent him away, and he died.”
Freddie paled. “That’s awful.”
“Henry was a girlhood crush, but Robert…Robert was real.” The last word was almost inaudible. “He was undone by it all, and drank too much and was flattened on a road in Wales. They didn’t find his body for three days, and when they did…” Her eyes closed. “I fainted when they told me, can you believe it? Like something in a silly film.”
None of us dared move. Eleanor stared into the fireplace, visibly fighting to compose herself. “When you’re my age, of course, you realize that people can recover from anything. But I didn’t understand that then. My heart didn’t feel like it would ever work properly again, and I told myself loving anyone that much was too painful a risk to take twice. But then Henry put me back together, and I realized I’d already reinvested myself in him. Trust. Affection. Love. And need. I did not think I could do this job without him.
“Then one day I found him out in the gardens playing croquet with Georgina, and there it was. I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw it start to have an effect on him. The same effect she had on everyone, our entire lives. That old Georgina charm,” she said. “I hadn’t thought she would bother with Henry. He was very nearly too old for me, and she was only seventeen. But seventeen felt more mature back then, I suppose, and Georgina certainly always thought of herself as sophisticated. I remember looking at them and thinking, I cannot lose him. Not to her.
“I never let on that I’d spotted anything. When she went back to school, I wrote, telling her all about Henry’s attentions to me, his tenderness, his kindness, what a fine partner he might make for me as I navigated all of this.” She waved a hand at the trappings of the Crown that sat around us. “I thought she’d accept that and move along. To this day, I still don’t know if she loved him for him, or because I told her how I felt and it made her want him for herself.”
Her tear ducts filled. “But I saw it in his face, whenever her name came up. His eyes always gave him away.” She blotted at her own. “I suppose I undertook some manipulations of my own. I told Henry she’d met someone while she was at school, and was practically betrothed, that it was very hush-hush. A clandestine romance.”
“You stole him,” Richard said.
“He wasn’t hers to steal, and I took nothing he didn’t freely give,” Eleanor snapped. “Georgina was no saint. Anything that came to me, she wanted. Toys. Clothing. Attention. Even the Crown itself. I did everything I could to impress Grandmummy, to make my father proud, to ready myself to take this on. I prepared. I behaved. Georgina had charm, but she didn’t realize how much of that was because she had the freedom to be charming. When my role increased, and attention shifted necessarily to me, Georgina became barbed with me in a way she wasn’t before. They prioritized me, for once, and she never forgot it, even if it was because there was never a real choice in the first place.”
“That doesn’t mean she went after Henry as revenge,” Nick argued.
“She would have hurt him, or tired of him. Both, once the intrigue was over,” Eleanor said vehemently. “And I never would have. I never did. Despite all of this.”
“She thought the world of you, though,” I said. “She looked up to you. It’s all over her diaries.”
“The ones you read. You didn’t see the rest of them. Things changed between us. She changed them,” Eleanor said. “She made herself the star of
